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One can't be happy as I have been for very long. There's a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.
John Steinbeck
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John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Hate
Hard
Sooner
Work
Punishment
Long
Enjoyed
Men
Worked
Later
Law
Happy
More quotes by John Steinbeck
But you can't start over Only a boy can start over You and me Why, we're all that's been
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I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.
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Some people there are who, being grown forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.
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Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
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He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
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I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
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Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him.
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No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.
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I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
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Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?
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You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
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A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
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How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
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That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
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It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
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In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
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I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
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Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.
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